Interesting, difficult and exam-oriented: exploring Chinese high school students' attitudes toward physics learning

Attitude study is one of areas receiving much attention from physics education researchers. It is found that students' attitudes about physics can play a crucial role in their learning behavior, achievements, and can strongly influence their motivation and pursuit of physics-related careers. However, Previous assessments of attitudes toward physics tend to overlook students' own feelings, motivation and unique experience in learning physics. Thus, a qualitative method was used to fully and deeply explore Chinese high school students' attitudes toward physics learning. Semi-structured interviews were conducted between July and October 2023 to enable students to share their understandings, feelings, learning strategies, motivation and experience in learning physics. Of all 32 participants, 17 come from western China and 15 from eastern China. Results found that the majority of participants considered physics interesting, but nearly all of them thought physics was difficult. In addition, the college entrance examination (Gaokao) and more employment options in the future were considered to be the main reasons and significance of learning physics, but beyond that, few students found out the exact meaning and value of learning physics for themselves. These findings are not positive, which is different from prior studies. For future work, it is worth to follow up and investigate our participants, so as to better understand their development of attitudes toward physics in the learning process.